Lyndon LaRouche political cult

"It is not necessary to wear brown shirts to be a fascist….It is not necessary to wear a swastika to be a fascist….It is not necessary to call oneself a fascist to be a fascist. It is simply necessary to be one!
--Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “Solving the Machiavellian Problem Today,” New Solidarity, July 7, 1978

Norman Bailey recalls that soon after he joined the National Security Council, he received a call from NSC officials asking him to talk to a group of followers of right-wing presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. who were offering intelligence information to the agency.

The Lyndon LaRouche organization has a thing about George Bush. One reason is that Bush personifies the sort of Anglo-American, Ivy League elitism -- from "old boy" family connections to "old boy" spook connections -- that has occupied LaRouche for the past two decades. Another is that LaRouche was a federal political prisoner during Bush's tenure, after having been targeted by the feds and railroaded on flimsy evidence. This book, published just before the 1992 election, gets weird at the end (LaRouche claims that Bush's hyperactive thyroid led us into Panama and the Gulf). But the previous 600 pages are a massive compendium of elitist connections not found elsewhere. Though a bit wobbly, perhaps, the book manages to stand on its own, if mainly by default.
It's also fair to ask what makes LaRouche tick. One theory is that he may be secretly sponsored by the Vatican. How else does one explain the tantrums against Freemasonry and secret societies (such as Bush's Skull and Bones), against Anglican apostasy (dope-pushing British imperialism), and against anything that smacks of planned parenthood or population control (the Malthusian activism of the Rockefellers)? When these tirades are occasionally juxtaposed with respectful quotations from His Holiness, it makes us wonder.

King, Dennis. Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 415 pages.

LaRouche started as a sectarian leftist and self-styled intellectual in the late 1960s. By 1973 cadres from his National Caucus of Labor Committees launched "Operation Mop Up" and began beating up rival leftist groups. Within several years the NCLC stepped over that thin line between sectarian leftism and the right wing, and was cooperating with the KKK, Liberty Lobby, and law enforcement officials. seIn the early Reagan years, LaRouche's anti-Sovietism found expression through his lobbying on behalf of Star Wars and his access to U.S. intelligence and other officials. His publications such as Executive Intelligence Review are taken seriously by journalists and investigators because of their demonstrated access to occasional inside information. At the same time, LaRouche's people are understandably regarded with a certain amount of healthy suspicion.
LaRouchian political theory is a mixture of Kant, anti-Semitism, and paranoic tirades against everything from British empiricism to Oliver North. It is something of a mystery how LaRouche funds his organization, which is also active in Germany. He was convicted in 1988 of conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax evasion (charges that grew out of his organization's sleazy fund-raising practices), and is serving a 15-year sentence. One suspects, however, that this clue provides a partial answer at best.
ISBN 0-385-23880-0

www.laroucheplanet.info
This website about the "LaRouche phenomenon" is unique because it is written by those who know him best: the ex-members of his Organization.
They have spent decades of their lives working with and for him. They knew him personally and helped to build his destructive cult. It is therefore an insider view on that Bizarro Planet of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Junior...
We hope this site will give those who are intrigued, puzzled or distressed by LaRouche and his Organization, a better "picture" of what would otherwise appear confusing or creepy.
It is a sort of LaRouche's (ideological) colonoscopy...

Publish and Perish
The mysterious death of Lyndon LaRouche's printer
By Avi Klein

For forty years, the Lyndon LaRouche movement has been a ubiquitous, if diminishing, presence in the political landscape of America, and of Washington. LaRouche has made eight runs for the presidency, including one campaign from prison. At D.C. press conferences and think tank events, a reporter for a LaRouche publication called Executive Intelligence Review can often be heard asking strange questions about the grain cartel. Young, malnourished LaRouche acolytes frequently stop Hill staffers on their way home from work and hand them pamphlets with titillating titles like "Children of Satan" or "The Gore of Babylon." A peek inside offers details on LaRouche's many enemies, such as the "Conrad Black–backed McCain–Lieberman–Donna Brazile cabal."

One of the LaRouche movement's longest-serving loyalists was Ken Kronberg. A handsome classics scholar and drama teacher, Kronberg owned and managed PMR Printing, the outfit that has generated the idiosyncratic propaganda that sustains LaRouche's entire enterprise. Last year, the LaRouche organization spent more than $2.5 million—at least 60 percent of its publicly reported expenditures—on printing and distributing pamphlets. Most of this money went to PMR. LaRouche's output was so prolific, in fact, that PMR ranked among the country's top 400 printers by sales. Despite this, the company's finances were in perilous shape. Various LaRouche organizations owed Kronberg hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the IRS and Virginia tax authorities came calling over withholding payments, Kronberg knew he was in serious trouble.

On April 11, 2007, Kronberg sat in PMR's offices in Sterling, Virginia, forty-five miles northwest of Washington, to read the "morning briefing," a daily compendium of political statements that reflect the outcome of the executive committee meetings held at LaRouche's house in the nearby town of Round Hill. This particular briefing struck unnervingly close to home. Written by a close associate of LaRouche's and addressed to the movement's younger followers, the brief bitterly attacked what it called the "baby boomers" in the organization—members like Kronberg who had joined LaRouche in the late 1960s and early '70s. The brief named "the print shop"—Kronberg's operation—as a special target. "The Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you're in the real world, and they're not," the brief read. "Unless," the writer added, the boomers "want to commit suicide."

This note may have had an effect. At 10:17 a.m., Kronberg sent an e-mail to his accountant instructing him to transfer $235,000 held in an escrow account to the IRS. He got in his blue-green Toyota Corolla and drove east. He mailed some family bills at the post office, then turned around onto the Waxpool Road overpass. Just before 10:30 a.m., Kronberg parked his car on the side of the overpass, turned on his emergency lights, and flung himself over the railing to his death. (Although LaRouche's home is only fifteen miles from the St. James Episcopal Church in Leesburg, Virginia, where Kronberg's funeral was held, LaRouche didn't show up for the service.)

True to form, LaRouche's current and former followers immediately burst forth with conspiracy theories. Had Kronberg been deliberately goaded to commit suicide by the movement's leaders? Had this private and modest man killed himself in a public fashion in order to draw attention to LaRouche's murky finances? Much of this speculation took place on FactNet, an Internet discussion board for former cult members. Users soon posted leaked internal memoranda from the LaRouche leadership showing that it, too, was blindsided and uncertain.

Whatever the answers to these questions, Kronberg's life and death perhaps tell an even more interesting tale. From the very beginning, the LaRouche movement has been a thoroughly paper-based cult. Its strange propaganda, disposable to most people who encounter it, has been central to both the movement's proselytizing activities and its finances. Although most of PMR's problems stemmed from LaRouche's own impecuniousness and his insatiable demand for printed materials, Kronberg's financial and legal troubles infuriated LaRouche. LaRouche was furious because he was frightened. Ink is the lifeblood of the LaRouche organization, and in PMR's impending demise, he could see the likely death of the organization itself.

The LaRouche movement has been called many things: Marxist, fascist, a political cult, a personality cult, a criminal enterprise, and, in the words of the Heritage Foundation, "one of the strangest political groups in American history." More than anything else, however, what it resembles is a vast and bizarre vanity press.